Please excuse me for a moment, while I interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you a little #SaveHannibal and a reflection on the changing nature of television entertainment.

In the beginning, television shows were mostly judged by how many people were watching when they aired. Determining a show's popularity and general profitability was pretty easy. Even in the early days of online streaming (watching media content online without having to download it), there was no such thing as competition between television networks and online streaming sites (excepting the free ones with pirated content that all companies united against). One produced the content, while the other distributed the product.

Small towns come in all sizes: Teeny to teeny-weeny; bitty to itty-bitty; eentsy-weentsy to itsy-witsy.
The one I grew up in was more on the dinky side---and while it gained some population through the years, it never became much above piddling.

But that just made it easier for Pat Cashman to know everybody in town. Not me---my dad, Pat Cashman, Sr. He knew them all.

I never called him the “old man” because I could never really tell his age---at least not without carbon dating.

Sometimes he seemed like he was a bit slow and shuffling---so I guessed him to be in his 30’s.
But then, he’d slip from his apparent dotage---and suddenly shoot a basketball swisher in our driveway from 40 feet away, grab his own rebound---and then drop another on my brothers and me.

However old he may have been, he was tall for his age: at least 6 foot 6---and he really did seem to know everyone in our pint-sized, sawed-off, one-horse town. He loomed like Gulliver in Lilliput.

It would be exciting to obtain a time machine and set it to ages past in order to observe the dating rituals from time immemorial. Then I got to thinking, maybe there was a time when there was no dating. Maybe the Neanderthal male just walked around with his club and when he needed sex he took it without asking. It would be interesting to flash back to the days before the modern world evolved a dating ritual. Women went to dances dressed in their enticing best and waited for a man to choose them. Then after marriage the woman took the man’s last name and women were not important outside the world of their husband’s sphere. Women didn’t even get to vote in this country before all men were allowed that privilege. As I have probably mentioned before, my mother didn’t get to vote until two months before I was born. And since my father had died before I was born I didn’t have the same sheltered upbringing that most young girls had in my day.